She was washing the Buick in the driveway when Gil pulled up in his pickup, on the pretext of leaving some bags of fertilizer, which he could just as easily have brought on his regular yard day next week. He and Carmen talked for several minutes, Gil holding his battered hat against his heart like a gentlemanly old suitor. Before he got into his truck to leave, he took a step back and gave a courteous little bow. Carmen, her hands clasped under her chin, bowed several times in return.
Julia, watching from the kitchen window, was tempted to laugh, though it occurred to her at the same moment that it was only further evidence of Carmen’s unerring instincts about people. That Gil adored her was obvious. And just as obvious was the fact that any kind of physical contact would have overstepped a boundary and discomfited him. So there they were, a Polish yard man and a girl from Wyoming, saying their farewells like two Buddhist monks.
In the middle of the afternoon, Carmen took the Buick for an oil change. She wasn’t gone long. “Once again Jiffy Lube lives up to its name,” she said when she walked onto the back porch, where Julia was sitting with a book in her lap, though not reading. “I would’ve been back even sooner, but Ricky was telling me all about his wife’s trip to China.”
Julia motioned to the wicker table, where she had laid the two Green River magazines. “There are a couple of things in there I want you to read—if you don’t mind. I marked the pages. It won’t take you long. They’re stories.”
“Oh, bummer,” Carmen said, laughing. “You know how much I hate stories.” She walked to the table. “I’ll do it right now.” She picked the magazines up. “You know what Ricky told me? His wife went to this open-air market in China, where they had all these live scorpions impaled on the end of sticks, and you could pick which one you wanted to eat and the vendor would fry it for you right there in this big pot of oil.”
Julia gave her a look. “If that’s a hint, it’s too late. We’re just having steak and chicken for our fondue tonight.”
Carmen said, “I’m going to miss your sense of humor, Aunt Julia.” She sat down on the glider and opened one of the magazines. “Hey, you wrote this?” She looked up at Julia. “I thought you said you didn’t write.”
“Just read them, and then we’ll talk,” Julia said.
• • •
WHEN Carmen finished reading, Julia told her. It seemed that it should have taken much longer to confess a shame carried around for so many years, but it was over quickly.
Carmen was nodding before she was done talking. “I remembered the one about the boy at the rodeo. Daddy read parts of it to me while he was writing it. I didn’t remember how it ended, though. And I didn’t remember much of the other one at all, except for that girl that killed all the chickens.”
Such a logical thing, of course—that Carmen would have heard or read the stories and, with a mind like hers, would have remembered them—yet a possibility Julia hadn’t considered.
Carmen gave herself a little push in the glider and looked up at the fan. “So that’s why you don’t write,” she said matter-of-factly. “Guilt. Punishment. Maybe some fear mixed in.”
“So anyway,” Julia said, “I put an envelope on top of your suitcase while you were gone. It has money in it—what I got paid for your father’s stories, plus some extra for interest. You have to take it. It’s yours, and it’s one small way you can help me.”
Carmen looked at Julia. “Daddy wanted you to have them. They were yours. They would never have gotten published if . . .”
“Don’t,” Julia said. “Please don’t.”
“But, think of it, they would’ve just sat somewhere in a box. Or been thrown away. That’s what Ida wanted to do with them, but Lulu said . . .”
“What I did was dishonorable. I need to hear you say you forgive me,” Julia said. “For your father’s sake. I could have published them under his name, but I took credit for something he did.” Saying it aloud made it sound worse. In her years of teaching, she had given more than one student a failing grade for turning in a paper written by someone else.
Carmen spread her arms wide. “Oh, Aunt Julia, of course I forgive you. Now you need to forgive yourself. Didn’t you give me a little talk about that one time? You need to just put it behind you and move on. Enough wandering in the wilderness. It’s time to lay down your fear and guilt and cross over into the good land of Canaan.”
Sometimes Julia had to smile at the girl’s simple way of thinking, as she did now. Not that it was funny, but what else was there to do?
• chapter 30 •
ATTENDING ANGELS
This was Julia’s meal to prepare. She banished the girl from the kitchen, told her to take a hike but be back by six. After she heard the screen door slam, Julia closed her eyes tight for a moment. She couldn’t let herself think about how quiet the house was going to be after tomorrow. No one to talk to, or to talk to her. No bantering, no singing, no sharing of Google tidbits, no discussing books or listening to music together, no sounds of the girl’s coming and going. She moved to the kitchen window.
At the end of the driveway, Carmen stopped and looked up into the trees, then turned right and started walking. Probably off to say good-bye to neighbors up and down Ivy Dale.
Well, time to get to work. She opened her cookbook to the page she had marked. She would make the sauces first: parsley butter sauce, blue cheese, bearnaise, and one called spicy hot. The sounds of The 1812 Overture wafted into the kitchen from the CD player. That was good. Tchaikovsky would keep her moving.
By the time Carmen returned, things were almost ready. The rice casserole and bread were in the oven, the broccoli and cauliflower were in the steamer, and the Caesar salad was in the refrigerator. The table was set, the fondue pot in the middle, filled with oil and ready to heat. She turned it on now.
“Look what Dr. Boyer gave me,” Carmen said from the kitchen doorway. “It’s a little French dictionary.” She held it up. “And Jackie and Nicole made me this.” She lifted a beaded string around her neck. “Hey, am I too early? I can hit the road again if you’re not ready for me.”
“Five minutes,” Julia said. “Just enough time for you to put on some new music and then see if you can squeeze your gifts into your suitcase.” It was a joke, of course. Carmen was taking so little with her that she had switched to a smaller suitcase. Even then, Julia kept telling her she needed packing peanuts to fill up all the extra space.
There was nothing quick about a fondue meal, which suited the purposes for a last supper. As did the candles and the brightly colored Fiesta ware. Julia had also set out yellow napkins and two ceramic salt and pepper shakers that looked like little bluebirds. The tablecloth was white with polka dots of every color.
Maybe for Julia’s benefit Carmen was only pretending, or maybe she had somehow developed an interest in the taste of food over the past couple of months, or maybe the retro look was the key, but whatever the cause, the whole meal seemed to delight her, especially the fondue. She loved the idea of cooking her meat in bites, tried all the sauces, declared the spicy hot her favorite.
And as they ate, they talked. First, small talk, then gradually bigger. Or, as Julia thought of it later, first wading in shallow water, and then barely able to touch bottom. And who was to say revelations were too late? They came when they came. She couldn’t say how it happened, for neither of them said at any point, “Okay, let’s dispense with the chitchat, this is our last time to really talk.” The leisurely nature of the meal must have contributed. Or perhaps it was simply the proving of a paradox Julia had once read: Living together erects barriers; separation tears them down. Maybe Carmen’s imminent departure had started a demolition.
All she knew was that in one breath Carmen was talking blithely about a cucumber-eating contest she had read about and in the next she was asking Julia if she knew what “sweetbread” was made out of and didn’t that sound revolting? And did she know that there could be as many as fourteen hundred strains of bacteria in a person�
�s belly button? And had she seen the peonies in Dr. Boyer’s yard with fat round buds the size of baseballs?
And then somehow, suddenly, the girl’s face clouded and she was talking to a slice of bread, turning it around and around in her hands, tearing off little bits of the crust and putting them in her mouth. “I never told you that the last time I called home was a year ago,” she said. She paused to chew, then, “Ida answered, but I couldn’t get any words out. She kept saying hello, hello, louder every time, and somebody in the background was saying, who is it, who is it? And then I heard Lulu just as plain as day, like she was all of a sudden standing right next to the phone. She said, ‘If it’s Carmen, let me talk to her. I want her to come home.’”
She stopped to chew again, then continued. “And then I felt all that old anger again, and I wanted to scream, ‘You wouldn’t even talk to me when I really needed you! You wouldn’t even let me in the door!’ And I hung up without ever saying a single word. And I never called back. Then when I got here, you told me . . . she was dead.”
There was a long silence. The girl looked at Julia sadly and said, “You were right—she did want me to come home. I knew I ought to, and the funny thing was I wanted to see her, too, I needed to. I was sick and tired of roaming around all over the place. But I was stubborn. I wanted to make her wait. So I thought I’d come down here and look you up first, and then . . . well, you know the rest from there.”
She sighed, took another bite of bread. “So my little speech yesterday about wandering in the wilderness? Well, that’s a place I know pretty well, believe me. I go back there for regular visits. I find where I hid my bundle of guilt and pick it back up and carry it around in circles for a while. And then it hits me again: Wait, I’m a child of grace, I don’t have to do this anymore! So I put it down again and head back to the good land. And then the cycle starts all over.”
She looked at Julia. “You probably wanted to clobber me for sounding so teachy-preachy. So wise and . . . instructive, like I have it all figured out. But I don’t. I sure don’t. I still have so many things to . . .” She trailed off.
“So do I,” Julia said. “Everyone does, I guess.”
There was silence again, except for the background music. The girl had chosen all her favorite CDs for dinner music. Incongruous to say the least—a talk about regret and guilt accompanied by Copland’s Billy the Kid. Most likely Bizet’s Carmen was in the mix somewhere, too.
• • •
CARMEN stood up. “I want to show you something.” She left the kitchen and returned a minute later with a book. From between the pages she took out what Julia thought at first was a bookmark and held it against her heart. “I never showed you this,” she said. “I don’t know why, really. I didn’t mean to be hoarding it, but I guess that’s what it amounted to. I guess I just wanted to look at it, not talk about it. Luna sent it to me in with my birthday card, so I’ve had it for a while. She sent me some money, too. I guess I never told you that either. She wrote a nice note saying it was just to help out whenever I needed it.”
She handed Julia what she was holding and said, “It was taken at the Christmas program.” It was a snapshot of Lizzy in a white angel costume, complete with iridescent gauzy-looking wings and a tiny gold halo. Her fine blond hair, charmingly messy, framed her sweet face and curled around her ears. She was looking up at something, her lips parted, her eyes alight with wonder, as if the heavens above her had split open to reveal real angels descending. She was in the very center of the photo, obviously the main reason for it, though parts of other children could be seen around her. The boy next to her had his whole hand in his mouth, and a girl behind her was crying, her halo lopsided. If it were Julia’s photo, she would get a pair of scissors and carefully cut around Lizzy and throw the rest away.
“Did you know Luna could sew?” Carmen said. “She made the costume.”
Julia couldn’t speak. She could only stare at the photo.
Carmen opened the book she was holding. “I’ve been reading this. I found it on the bookshelf in the living room.”
Julia glanced up. She recognized it—a slim volume with a blue cloth cover, titled Essays on Living Well. It had been among the few books Matthew owned when they were first married, one of those books you kept more for looks than contents, though she shouldn’t judge the contents of this one since she had never read the first word. She only knew she wasn’t interested in reading essays by a man with the unremarkable name of Bill Smith, especially with a Rev. in front of it. At least he could have dignified it a little by using William instead of Bill.
“Here’s the part I keep reading over and over,” Carmen said. “Listen to this. It’s from a chapter called ‘Honor Thy Children.’” She began reading. “Letting your child go is the ultimate act of love, demanding of parents the kind of seasoned courage that acknowledges the presence of evil yet believes in the greater power of good. A parent who releases his child must first release himself from fretting over past failures, present fears, and future dangers. A parent who views his child as an extension of himself becomes greedy for perfect performances, seeing the child’s success as his own. Letting go, then, starts with a giving up of one’s pride. As at the end of a weary day, the parent must lay aside his busy efforts and schemes, rest his head on the pillow of faith in a wise and good God, and trust attending angels to guard his precious one through the uncertain night ahead in a place beyond his reach.”
She stopped reading but didn’t lift her eyes. “There’s more, but that’s the part I keep coming back to.” She looked at Julia. “I know he’s talking about older children here, but he’s talking to me, too. I have to give her up.”
Julia didn’t mean to sound so full of wrath and panic. “She was taken from you!” she said. She was surprised to hear her voice shaking. “Why should you have to give her up again?”
Carmen didn’t answer right away. She looked back down at the book, studied the page. Finally she said, “She’s another reason I have to leave. The main reason, really. I didn’t tell you that part. I can’t keep reliving the past and wishing things were different. I can’t live my life through her and make her responsible for my happiness, which is what I would do if I stayed here.” She looked at Julia again. “I would live from visit to visit, hoping to see her in the park, or hoping maybe she would be at Luna’s one day when I was there, and maybe even some wonderful, glorious day would come along when I could actually pick her up and hold her. But if I went to Luna’s and didn’t get to see her, I would cry, and if I did, I would still cry, maybe harder. And then her parents might start . . .”
“You have every right to see her!” Julia said. “They need to know who you are. They need to know what you’ve been through.”
Carmen looked horrified. She was the first to break the silence that followed. “They can’t know, ever. That’s the whole point. Don’t you see? How could I do that to them? I’ve made Luna promise not to tell them, and you can’t either. You’ve got to promise me that, Aunt Julia.” Her eyes brimmed with tears.
Julia turned away and said nothing. She felt an astonished kind of fury, that the girl could be so willing to turn her back on something so dear, so undeniably hers.
“I’ve thought this through, and I know I’m right,” Carmen continued. “I’ve tried to imagine how Vanessa would feel. She would look at Lizzy every day and know she was . . . taken away from someone who loved and wanted her. How would it feel to know every minute of every day that your joy wasn’t really yours, it was stolen from somebody else? Why should I want to make them live with that?”
Answers sprang to Julia’s mind at once—because it was the truth, because what had happened was so painfully wrong, because Carmen shouldn’t have to suffer alone. But they weren’t really answers. The girl’s line of thought didn’t take into account her rights, but it was right, of course. It was driven by love, and there was no arguing against love and mercy and sacrifice. They were their own justification.
One final thought, though. “Lizzy will need to know who you are sometime in her life,” Julia said. “What if she wants to find you someday?”
“Someday isn’t today,” Carmen said. “Right now she needs to be happy. And that means her parents need to be happy, too.” More childish, simplistic reasoning, yet true. “For our affliction will bring about an eternal glory,” she added. “We walk by faith, not by sight. We fix our eyes on things that are not seen.” More of her Bible verses, no doubt. Nothing to be gained by arguing with those either.
• • •
CARMEN closed the book and set it on the table. “Leaving her behind is going to take every ounce of faith I have. But I’ve seen her, and she’s happy and loved. And I’ve seen her attending angels. I’ve talked to them both. Their names are Vanessa and Robert. God is good.” She laid a hand on the book. “I just wanted you to know all this. I couldn’t talk about it before. It’s taken a long time to sort it all out. But you deserve to know.”
Julia handed Carmen the photo. Her thoughts were still whirling. She said the only thing she could think of to say. “Well, thank you.”
Carmen blotted the corner of each eye with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “No problem,” she said, with the smallest of smiles. “And Luna’s going to write me. And send me pictures.”
Julia stood up and started clearing the table, and Carmen rose to help. Phrases from the book kept playing through Julia’s mind: the ultimate act of love, seasoned courage, the uncertain night ahead. She could have picked the essay apart for its reliance on generalizations, its scattered organization, its affectations, the obvious effort of the Reverend Smith to sound earnest, literary, deeply moving, and whatever else he was trying to be. And the crowning touch, the laughable metaphor at the end about the pillow.
To See the Moon Again Page 36